Top 1200 Great Soccer Quotes & Sayings - Page 20

Why do people speak of great men in terms of nationality? Great Germans, great Englishmen? Goethe always protested against being called a German poet. Great men are simply men and are not to be considered from the point of view of nationality, nor should the environment in which they were brought up be taken into account.

It's as great a part of the human adventure to invent things as to understand them. John Randall wasn't a great scientist, but he was a great inventor. There's been lots more like him, and it's a shame they don't get Nobel Prizes.

They [some countries] borrowed money to go acquire things, Indian power plants and Danish newspapers and British soccer teams. And they did it willy-nilly, and they themselves a story, that Icelandic history and culture and DNA leaves us very well-suited to being investment bankers.

There never was a great truth but it was reverenced; never a great institution, nor a great man, that did not, sooner or later, receive the reverence of mankind.

We won the European Championship last September and now the world title. That is some year for French beach soccer! Now comes the hard part. We have to keep improving and that's difficult because it's tough to do better than winning a world title.

When I was playing soccer at the age of 14, the first thing we'd do before going out onto the field would be to climb up on one another's thighs and massage the legs; it was a regular thing. None of us had a thought of being gay, absolutely not, and it's the same with most bodybuilders.

I'm very fortunate to work with a great group of guys that are great coaches, great motivators, excited about what they do, have a lot of enthusiasm and are excellent coaches.

I'm a little skeptical of foreign coaches in our league and in U.S. Soccer just because of how different our league is and our players are than other players around the world.

I've heard people say that the trouble with the world is that we haven't enough great leaders. I think we haven't enough great followers. I have stood side by side with great thinkers - surgeons, engineers, economists; people who deserve a great following - and have heard the crowd cheer me instead.

I had beautiful years with Southampton - great club, great people, great supporters - and I'm very proud of my four years.

I haven't been manipulated. I did a documentary in prison years ago because I was so f - ed off with those lazy bastards in their bed for 18 hours a day, five dishes a day on a menu to choose from, playing soccer every day, going to the gym, watching movies.

Rugby is a different game. There is an interruption every two minutes also in American football. Our soccer is a moving game: play, play, play, move, move - you don't interrupt.

In football, in any sport, communication is really key. So if you want to be a great teammate, a great team and a great player, then communication is very important.

I played one year of competitive basketball, actually. I don't remember what grade I was in, maybe middle school or something. I was the point guard - I was the smallest one always. I did my best; I thought I did pretty good. I was always a little bit better at soccer, so I had to make the decision.

To be honest I never watch a tennis match. I watch basketball a lot, soccer, never tennis.

Inequality brings a visceral reaction. We fought many years to bring others to believe in what was possible with women's soccer, in this country and globally. Now that the possible is being realized in this country, the American women should be compensated accordingly.

I will say, I'm a great, great, great grandson of Stephen F. Austin. He founded Austin, Texas, which is kind of cool.

What's so great about making television is that it's a collaborative beast. It's created by a great many hands belonging to a great many people.

I don't want to be a great executive without being a great mom and a great wife. I don't want to look back and say I wish I had done things differently.

The crowds at West Ham haven't been rewarded by results, but they keep turning up because of the good football they see. Other clubs will suffer from the old bugbear that results count more than anything. This has been the ruination of English soccer.

Great brands and great businesses have to be great storytellers, too. We have to tell stories - emotive, compelling stories - and even more so because we're nonfiction.

The early '90s was the best time for hip-hop. The Cube's, the Snoop's, the Dre's - that was a golden time with great music, great albums, great groups, everything.

Pro wrestling is a different animal than pro football and pro soccer. There is going to be a lot of money going out before the bulk of the money can come back in.

Growing up, I played about every sport imaginable except soccer and hockey. I've always had a passion for basketball. I remember actually playing basketball when I was two or three years old. The time I knew that I could really take my game to the next level.

Soccer is a continuous game, rugby is a continuous game, but for the physical elements that are involved in playing a football game and the number of plays that you play, I don't know that it was ever intended to be a continuous game.

A soccer game is a Wagner opera. The narrative sets up, the tension builds, the music ebbs and flows, the strings, the horns, more tension, and suddenly a moment of pure bliss, trumpet-tongued Gabriel sings, and gods descend from Olympus to dance - this peak of ecstasy.

I've seen a lot of friends who have a lot of great projects, whether it's a script or a play or whatever, and it is a great project and they have great people involved, and they can't make it.

Get the best player because whether it's soccer or whether it's anything else the team with the best players wins. So focus your energy on getting the best and getting rid of the weakest.

There have been great men with little of what we call education. There have been many small men with a great deal of learning. There has never been a great people who did not possess great learning.

I had a coach that was not a great player, but he taught with kids and juniors so that by the time he was 50 he was great. He helped me make the top 5 in the world and yet he wasn't a great player himself.

Those soccer style kickers have a difficult time getting the ball up, especially off dirt. They can get the ball up fast enough off artificial surfaces, but when it's on a natural grass surface it's entirely different for them.

I don't have a great instrument. I don't have the kind of ungodly control over my voice and body that great actors have. And I've worked with enough great actors to know that I'm not one.

The United States is a great, great country, but it's not the only country, and we can learn a great deal beyond our own shores.

Great things demand that we either remain silent about them or speak in a great manner: in a great manner, that is-cynically and with innocence.

Sex was a great no-no for Americans, so that was obviously an attraction to the writers, and since sex is a great part of most people's lives, it's a great subject.

I played soccer all my life and I used to think growing up that they put the fat kid in goal or they put the kid that wasn't good with the ball at their feet in goal and I never wanted to do goalkeeper, I was always the goal scorer.

You know a dog loves you for who you are; they don't know if you're a soccer player or not. Sometimes people treat you good because you're a footballer or because you're famous, but a dog doesn't know it.

Crosby is a great player, but I'd have to say Ovechkin, who is also a great player but doesn't have the same kind of support, and who does something great on almost every shift.

I get very envious of my general news colleagues who are always being handed sexy new stuff like global warming, China, and Donald Trump, while my sports colleagues and I must be eternally satisfied with the same old home-court advantage, soccer, and momentum.

Like great art, something essential dies when great jokes are explained. So what's the key to telling a good joke/creating great art timing.

We don't have any kind of sponsors. The players invest themselves. They need money. They need resources... That's why, in sports and teams, they have sponsors - in soccer, in the NFL. Everyone has sponsors who invest and help to pay daily expenses.

Great stories and acting always win the day. If the story behind the scares is dramatic and the filmmaking is great, it works. If those things aren't great and the scares are secondary, it doesn't.

I thought that basketball and soccer were hard. And then I went to track practice. It's just running and running and running. And my event was the 400 hurdles. I ended up qualifying for state. But looking back on it, track was hard.

Everyone who sits on a sofa watching 'Match of the Day' is a top soccer expert, as you know. So if you start to worry about such people reading your story and saying, 'That'd never happen' you're going to freeze up. You're writing fiction, and your characters can do whatever you need them to do.

Sports formed me. I was always decently skilled but lacked size, so I had to resort to using my skill versus my power. I strategically play golf because that's all I can do. It's the same on the basketball court. I try to get open and shoot it. Or I use the open space on the soccer field.

Soccer is a continuous game, rugby is a continuous game, but for the physical elements that are involved in playing a football game and the number of plays that you play, I don't know that it was ever intended to be a continuous game.

The great thing for me is I wasn't a great player - I managed at the lower level and managed to be successful and that gives great hope to everyone else.

To me, a great drummer isn't always about somebody with chops who can shred. A great drummer is someone who is part of a great band.

Even all the top players going to Europe to play helps soccer in America, as do all the MLS players like Beckham and all that, they're trying to promote it. At the end of the day it's about getting the younger generation interested at an early age so most of them will move on and play.

You not only do you appreciate the sacrifices people have made and the hours they've kept and the soccer games they missed and the birthday parties, but I also had a lot of young people who came in here [to White House], and this probably, you know, echoes with you, in your own experience, you were young when you got here.

If I couldn't get to the national team, I wanted to get as much as I could out of soccer, and I think moving abroad was my opportunity to do that. I think that, in turn, playing with that freedom and that spirit allowed me to play a lot better. I escalated my game quickly just by being happy.

Let every man or woman here remember this, that if you wish to be great at all, you must begin where you are and with what you are. He who would be great anywhere must first be great in his own Philadelphia.

So in every sense, from an independent artist to a major label artist, you just have to have great product, great faith and great people, they all go together.

What great comedians, great comic writers, great comic actors do is that they just read the headlines with the right eyebrow position and it's funny.

My father was a very fun dad. He was always coaching our soccer sports teams; he made sure that we had activities to do. He was kind of goofy and fun. But at the same time, he had a lot of lessons to teach us so that we didn't grow up and just not be good people.

When Sweden's Jan-Ove Waldner travels to China to play table tennis, he is mobbed when he leaves his hotel as if he were a rock star walking around Manhattan or a soccer star walking around Europe.

When my father became vice president, I was a sophomore in high school. I'd do things like go on a run with my soccer team and purposely dodge the security van. Then my parents compromised with the Secret Service when I went to college. I just had a panic button in my dorm room, so if I pressed that, they'd be there within 2 or 3 minutes.

Now, modern economies have a very effective mechanism for deciding if salaries are really too high: it's called the free market. That's how most people's salaries are set, after all, including those of major-league baseball players and European soccer players.

Authenticity is about imperfection. And authenticity is a very human quality. To be authentic is to be at peace with your imperfections. The great leaders are not the strongest, they are the ones who are honest about their weaknesses. The great leaders are not the smartest; they are the ones who admit how much they don't know. The great leaders can't do everything; they are the ones who look to others to help them. Great leaders don't see themselves as great; they see themselves as human.

You can feel the same thing in football or soccer - that for the best teams in Spain and England, for instance, the public... they're not really going to cheer at all when they play against bad teams unless they do something spectacular. Even if they're winning by a few goals they'll probably just say, "nah." That's normal and they're not excited about it.